Ma. Ceres P. Doyo, Philippine Daily Inquirer, September 21, 2000

LAST Friday, the World Bank launched its ''World Development Report for 2000/2001: Attacking Poverty.'' The report follows two other reports on poverty released in 1980 and 1990. The report, said WB country director Vinay Bhargava, ''seeks to expand the understanding of poverty and its causes and sets out actions that solve the problem of poverty in all its dimensions.''

Actions in the areas of promoting opportunity, facilitating empowerment and enhancing security are fundamentally complementary, Bhargava added, and each is important in its own right and each enhances the others.

There is no simple universal blueprint, however, the report stressed, and countries need to develop their own poverty-reduction strategies, reflecting national priorities and local realities, backed up by local leadership and ownership. National and local initiatives, it added, need to be complemented by global actions to achieve maximum benefits for poor people around the world.

A lot of development jargon there, I must say. But it was good to see at the launching familiar faces from NGOs and POs. These are the people who are in touch with the poor and know the human face of poverty. And while it was good to listen to what the WB experts had to say as backgrounder to the report, people in the audience were more interested in what were said about the Philippines.

The WB says the following are the key facts about poverty in the Philippines:

• The incidence of poverty has gone down significantly since the 1980s (from 41 percent in 1985 to 26 percent in 1999).
• Poverty appears to have increased in 1998 when per capita GDP fell by 2.6 percent due to the combined effects of the Asian crisis and El Niño but began to decline again in 1999 as the economy started to recover.
• The depth and severity of poverty have also declined (that is, those below the poverty line have on average moved closer to the threshold).
• Persistent poverty in the Philippines still remains a predominantly rural phenomenon: the rural poor constitute about 37 percent of the rural population and make up almost three-fourths of the country's poor.
• There have been significant regional disparities in poverty reduction, with five regions lagging: the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao, Caraga, Central Mindanao, Central Luzon and Eastern Visayas.
• The overwhelming majority of the poor live in households where the head has little education.

The WB's strategy, outlined in the report, built on three pillars: opportunity, empowerment and security. Opportunities for the poor results in overall growth and increases the assets of the poor such as land and education and increases the returns on these assets. Empowerment, the WB says, is about making public institutions work for the poor, removing social barriers and building social institutions. Improved governance, a judicial system that promotes legal equity and is accessible to the poor, and the effective delivery of services to the poor are integral parts of the agenda for effective empowerment. And security means reducing the poor's vulnerability to risks (such as ill health, economic shocks, crop failure and violence), largely by helping them manage risks and ensuring that effective safety nets are in place.

The WB's recommendation for poverty reduction are growth, education and target interventions and social safety net provisions. Growth, especially labor-intensive growth, has the greatest impact on poverty. Says the report on the Philippines: ''A key question confronting policymakers in the Philippines is how to bring back, then sustain growth of 5 percent per annum and more. And the nature or quality of growth is important to increase equity. Given the nature of most poverty in the Philippines, accelerating rural development is particularly important.

''While most of the urban poor could be pulled out of their predicament by sustained, export-led growth, improving the lot of the poorest, most of whom live in rural areas, will require increased rural investments and the provision of basic social services. Access to land is an important determinant of rural poverty, so expeditious implementation of the government's ongoing land reform program is strategically important.''

Education, says the report, has proven to be the most effective means for the poor to join and share in overall economic growth, while contributing to a in reduction fertility rates (the Philippines has the highest in the region) and income disparities.

As to interventions and safety net provisions, they need accurate monitoring and information systems. These, says the report, will require channeling more resources to poorer areas and developing monitoring and impact evaluation systems for transparency and accountability.

During the launching, someone from the WB office slipped me a book not included in the press kit. ''Voices of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us?'' written by Neepa Narayan and four associates, is a WB 2000 book that tells us how the poor see their poverty.

I went through it and found it very interesting, full of true-to-life experiences. It throbs. I could feel it right away. ''Voices of the Poor,'' says the blurb on the jacket, actually consists of ''three books that bring together the experiences of over 60,000 poor women and men.'' The first book, ''Can Anyone Hear Us?'' gathers the voices of over 40,000 poor women and men in 50 countries from the WB's participatory poverty assessments. The second, ''Crying Out for Change,'' draws material from a new 23-country comparative study. The third, ''From Many Lands,'' offers regional patterns and country case studies. More on this next time.